Headbang - Friday the 13th

There must be something about Friday the 13th - our last headbang in February was also held on this date. We had a full attendance from the headbangers section - plus our youngest ever new recruit - Jeb's son, whose name is, appropriately, Dylan. It's always the youngsters who flag first at our headbangs - Dylan was spotted dozing off on his Dad's shoulder pretty early on in the evening - although he just managed to prise his eyelids open in time for this shot:


As usual, we started with our obituary section - and there has been a total of 12 relatively significant artistes who had passed away since our last gathering - one of whom, Ellie Greenwich, was a writer rather than a performer, but her place in the pantheon of rock and roll history is so assured that we had to include a couple of clips of her famous songs - from the Ronettes and the Crystals.

After playing all 12 clips, we each voted on who would be the most and the least missed amongst them. The clear winner was Les Paul, and the top 6 finished up this way:

1. Les Paul - 74
2. Koko Taylor - 69
3. Michael Jackson - 65
4. Willy de Ville - 64
5. Ellie Greenwich & Mary Travers - 54 each

Stephen Gateley barely mustered the minimum number of votes - although, despite issuing detailed voting instructions earlier in the day, our host seemed to struggle with the concept of ranking the artistes from 1-12!

Next up was a brief celebration of the 40th anniversaries of 3 significant events that occurred in 1969:

• The release of the Beatles final recording - Abbey Road
• The Stones in the Park gig - their first with Mick Taylor, just a few days after the death of Brian Jones.
• Woodstock

The first and last named were clearly the most significant and the voting was almost evenly split, with Colin, Gary and I opting for the Beatles, but we were out-numbered by the rest who voted for Woodstock.

The main theme of the evening was old favourites - and Andy and Colin had taken the lead here by pre-selecting their favourite clips from my archive of over 1,000 individual music video files.

Andy had selected 17 clips, which were voted for on a scale of 1-10. There was a tie at the top between Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry and Squeeze's Up the Junction - both with 74 points out of a possible maximum of 80. Seasick Steve's Doghouse Blues came in a close 3rd with 72.

Colin's favourites were more extensive - 36 in all, which meant the taxi back to Drumoak and Culter arrived before we got through all the video clips, forcing Jeb, Dylan and Malcolm to miss the last 7 of CK's selections - and Gary also took the opportunity to slope off at this time.

The hard core of Colin, Andy and I stayed on at Dave's, playing more of the videos, and we asked Malcolm and Jeb to order a taxi to come out and pick us up. We were a little surprised that it was the same taxi who came to pick us up an hour later - especially when we discovered that it was a Davro 6 seater, which could have taken us all at the same time!

The team photo was therefore a bit short in numbers:

Nonetheless, we managed to garner sufficient votes to declare a result on Colin's favourites. The clear winner here was the Who's Won't Get Fooled Again with an amazing 69 out of a possible 70 maximum (Dylan didn't vote as he was asleep during most of it!). The rest of the top 10 scored pretty well with Cream, Dylan, Animals, Stones, Blockheads, Dr. Feelgood, Fleetwood Mac, Hendrix and the Faces trailing in behind the Who.

Another great night - bring on the next one!